Long before becoming one of experimental music’s most influential guitarists, David Torn was developing an unconventional relationship with sound. Studying under famed conductor Leonard Bernstein, before refining his approach with jazz guitarists Pat Martino and John Abercrombie, Torn joined Lou Reed’s Everyman Band in the early ‘80s and began pioneering the looping, signal processing and atmospheric textures that would define his sound.
Blending acoustic and electronic instrumentation into immersive soundscapes that blurred genre boundaries, Torn’s landmark 1987 release Cloud About Mercury remains a foundational avant-jazz recording.
Yet Torn's influence extends far beyond his solo catalogue. Over four decades, he has collaborated with artists including k.d. lang, David Sylvian, Ryuichi Sakamoto and of course, David Bowie - contributing to beloved early ’00s albums Heathen, Reality and 2013’s extraordinary comeback, The Next Day - while also lending his distinctive textural approach to dozens of film soundtracks.
Now, more than four decades into his groundbreaking career, Torn releases his first solo album in over a decade, Now I Imagine a Place Not the Same. The expansive LP revisits the raw electricity of his early processing experiments - particularly his pioneering work with feedback and looping - while pushing into new sonic territory through improvisation and exploring drones.
Torn also reflects on navigating deafness following an acoustic neuroma diagnosis, and the transcendent experience of watching Bowie compose lyrics spontaneously, just two days before 9/11.
MusicRadar: Do you remember the very first time you picked up a guitar and what it felt like in that moment?
David Torn: “Absolutely. My mother presented me with the instrument after saving up stamps from buying things at a very large store. I played it for a few weeks without a teacher and didn't know how to tune it, but I took a knife or some kind of glass and used it on the neck like a slide.
"Then my mother got me a very passionate flamenco teacher from southern Spain. He didn't speak much English and was very tough. I begged my mother to let me take another kind of lesson, because he had a very small conductor's baton and when I couldn't play the rasgueado (a flamenco strumming technique) correctly he’d give me a little tap on the fingers.
“Then my mother handed me over to one of her dear friends who was a jazz guitarist. I mean, [he was] unbelievable. This guy would take a pop tune he'd never seen before and rearrange it so that I could play like him. That was it. I started playing in bands for a few years, until I had the realisation that I hated playing in front of people.”
MR: You joined Everyman Band, which was a pretty wild jazz fusion outfit. Was that intimidating?
DT: “They’d been Lou Reed's band for four years and I’d already been in a band of my own for seven years way upstate in New York. We cultivated oddness because we didn’t want to copy other people. I wasn't intimidated, but playing for the first time was a little freaky. Later, I was invited by Don Cherry to join his band for two weeks and that was intimidating because the tour was so disorganised.
“It was Don Cherry and band, Everyman Band, plus me and the Swedish drummer Bengt Berger. When I got to England I had no money, couldn't find the hotel and the French promoter forgot to pick me up at the airport, so it was just a fiasco. Eventually, I was told that Don was on the fourth floor of this hotel and I should go up and see him. I had all the melodies written out, but he basically took the paper away and said, ‘Let's just play this shit.’ He sang and played a little pocket trumpet and I had an electric guitar with no amp. We ran through a few things and then he goes, ‘Okay, let's do the Rainbow Theatre tomorrow!’”
MR: What didn’t you initially like about playing live?
DT: “People made me paranoid and I didn't like their eyes on me, but after going through that I had some kind of basis to say that when you're in music you have to be music. I wasn’t looking to be a personality and I couldn't just play it, I had to be it. That was a very big moment for me and then we went on tour with The Slits, Prince Hammer and Creation Rebel for two weeks.”
MR: Was it only when you started working on your solo projects that you began to really start experimenting with guitar sounds and textures?
DT: “I started well before all of that, but was always a little off-base and practising a lot of technical stuff. I learned a ton of harmony and a lot about rhythm over the course of six years with noted teachers and was always looking for other ways to reveal my own voice - and that’s never stopped.
“I had an electronics background and became immersed in it, but I didn’t have enough money to do anything, so once I developed past the point of copying my heroes I looked at how I could do mechanical things differently. We lived in Ithaca, New York for 10 years and I had a free improv band, but you only do that with people who feel comfortable truly improvising. Later on, I realised it’s really important that I improvise when I'm composing too.”
MR: As a session player, one of the first albums you worked on was David Sylvian's Secrets of the Beehive. What are your recollections of working with an artist who is known for allowing musicians to have a lot of free rein?
DT: “It was exactly that - a very open environment. He was very friendly, the music was great and the engineering was great. When I did film sessions, I would typically be called in to add something to the picture and David Sylvian was like that for me. David Bowie, k.d. Lang and Meshell Ndegeocello also said, 'What are you going to contribute here?' and then they let me find something. That’s kind of marked my career as a player - the stuff I'm most proud of isn’t where I killed the sight reading but where I thought: 'What am I adding to this?'
"The amount of people I’ve played with has been fucking crazy and they’re so different from each other, but I usually found a way to fit in.
“There were a couple of unhappy failures. I tried to work with Tori Amos and we had a great time together, but I just didn't hit the vibe. I think I ended up on one track from her record, but I never knew why. Usually it's something to do with your relationship with other people, because we're all a bit crazy.”
MR: One of the Sylvian tracks you worked on was The Boy with the Gun. It's a gorgeous track with very dark lyrical undertones. Is that something you discussed with him as a portal into his imagination?
“David and I both came from a place where we were really interested in storyline, but we didn’t really discuss anything until he started reacting to some of the things I was improvising. He’d make a comment that would lead me somewhere, but we were just two talented people who read a lot of books, watched a lot of films and, in my case, had worked on a lot of films.
“I loved playing to picture and adding something to a scene that doesn't distract but supports something that needs highlighting, even if it's very subtle. I think that was implicit between David and me - the commentary was always, 'This is good, but this is going to work better.'
"On The Boy with the Gun, the lyric is dark, but the music isn't and it sounded like a mysterious movie. I thought, 'There’s mystery here - how did this guy get to be the boy with the gun?' There's no direct explication, but like a lot of David’s music, it felt like something slightly mysterious and not really right.”
MR: Relative to your work with Sylvian, you worked on a number of records with Mick Karn, who was clearly a uniquely talented bass player?
“I’d already met Mick the year before I started working with David when he played on the album Cloud About Mercury, but he tried to get out of being in my band. What an asshole - but a brilliant asshole. He was scared because he didn’t want to play in what he felt was a quote/unquote ‘muso band’. Some of us had a lot of training and technique and Mick felt that he wouldn't be able to fit in.
“Bill Bruford really challenged him a lot, but it wasn't quite the right thing to do when we were rehearsing with Mick. He was his own man and just stood up and played his shit, which is exactly what you want. You don't play mine, you play yours - and Mick may not have had training on the bass, but he had training in music. He was his instrument and we loved him for his playing.”
MR: In the 1990s, you were diagnosed with acoustic neuroma, which left you deaf in the right ear. Was that issue completely resolved?
DT: “They removed the whole thing but I had seven years of after-effects. You know, people look at my brain a lot more than you’d think given that it happened almost 40 years ago, but I still have to do a lot of neurological diagnoses because there was a shift in the build of the brain from a spot they found that no one was able to diagnose. Every once in a while I have an episode of some sort, like a horrifying migraine or a blank spot in my social affect where I might not be there for a minute, and sometimes that's not so safe.”
MR: That period must have been extremely challenging
DT: “I really struggled to learn how to hear and I have no stereo, but I can mix records because I had so many years of stereo hearing that my imagination knows how to place things technically. The first year was like dragging my feet through hell. I had aphasia for a couple of weeks, I couldn't talk and then I’d say the wrong word in my head and think, ‘How did that happen?’
“But I had a lot of support from ECM Records - they totally took care of me and there were a couple of benefit concerts because I had three neurosurgeons on duty from my 12-hour operation.
"People I barely knew like Suzanne Vega did a benefit in the States and I can’t remember where Mark Isham did his, but it was really touching that people had enough love and respect to try and help a musician deal with half a million dollars of debt when I was handicapped for two years.”
MR: Was there anything weirdly beneficial about having to adapt to your circumstances as a musician?
DT: “Absolutely, because the hardest part - besides the pain - was learning how to hear again. The amount of noise that existed internally from them opening the skull and moving it was phenomenal. There was bone dust left in the dura mater, which is one of the reasons why there was so much sound in my head, and I still live with that, but in a different way.
“I practiced listening to things until I could get everything sounding like some element of normal. I’d listen to Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters, Prince and all kinds of shit. What was the name of that band that started out as a pop band and had Danny Thompson play bass on it? Oh, yes - Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, which was a really ground-breaking record because it was very poetic and not directly rhythmic, but spacious.”
MR: You worked with David Bowie on a trio of albums from 2000 onwards. Heathen, Reality and The Next Day How did that collaboration come about?
DT: “Around 1990, I’d got a call from Peter Gabriel’s manager, and while it was hard for me to believe this was happening, it seemed like Peter was thinking about having me work on a new record, but it just never occurred. A similar thing happened with David Bowie in 1987 when I got a call from an office in New York from Richard Hilton, who was co-assistant to Nile Rodgers. He said, ‘Hey, we're really interested in getting you into to meet David and do some stuff on a track.’ Of course, I said yes, but it disappeared just like the Peter Gabriel thing. Richard was very apologetic, but I eventually met David after adding textural devices to a Brian Helgeland film that was being scored by my friend Carter Burwell.
“They had this big score playing right into a scene with Heath Ledger and Carter called me to help find a way to transition the David Bowie song Golden Years into a very funny spot. Later, David went into the studio and Carter called me to say that that David loves David Torn and liked what I’d done. Two weeks later, the office called and told me that David would like a meeting and would I care to have dinner with him somewhere?”
MR: It must have gone well…
DT: “We went out to dinner and David said that he’d been thinking about doing a new kind of project and asked if I wanted to be involved. I said, ‘Are you kidding?’
"Tony Visconti joined us a little later and David and I discovered we had all these weird connections between us. At the end of the conversation he asked where I’d like to work. I thought, ‘Where would I like to work?’ But I lived in a land of amazing, world-class studios around Bearsville, Woodstock, New York, and there was this unbelievable place on the top of a hill in LA that my friend had designed called Atlantic. David said, ‘Well, I hate Woodstock, but maybe it's changed’ and ended up coming upstate and loving it.”
MR: Do you recollect having any conversations with Bowie about sound and experimentation that have stuck with you?
DT: “Not really. We used to watch The Office and both liked these old but incredible amplifiers from Chicago in the 1940s and he wanted to have an eBay battle. He’d bid for stuff and eventually I’d look at him and say, ‘I’m out - I can't do that.’ He did give me great business advice though, because I was in the midst of this unfair usage thing for a Madonna song. It turned out her producer stole some shit and tried to get away with it.”
MR: We understand Madonna intervened to make sure that you got a writing credit?
DT: “Yes, she stepped up. David and I had had a number of sampling issues going on in our careers by then, so I asked if he had any advice. His reply was, ‘If they're big, go after them, but if you like them and they're little, don't bother making an enemy’. But playing with David was incredibly edifying and I think I witnessed one of my peak musical moments in life which was David Bowie standing sideways next to me in an open room while being recorded.
“He had little sheets of paper all around him and was singing the first lyrics to Sunday from Heathen, but it was so physically powerful. It wasn't that he's famous or a good looking dude - it's not any of that shit, it was knowing that David was coming up with these lyrics that he'd put together in real-time and that this was part of his improv challenge.
“Engineer Brandon Mason was at the console to my left and Bowie's literally three feet away when Brandon touched me on the shoulder while he's singing. David's completely focused on the space ahead of him and I don't want to make too much of this, but the hairs on Brandon’s arm were standing straight up. Then the hairs on the back of my neck went up and I was like, this is insane - how does this happen? The yogi's would call it a Kundalini moment - all focused energy. And he wrote that lyric two days before 9/11.”
MR: You're about to release your first LP in over a decade. After so many years of collaboration and experimentation, was there a story you felt you needed to tell?
DT: “That's a yes and no answer. Yes because there's always a story, and no because I have to be in the moment and thinking is not the most practical value when I'm constantly manipulating electronics and loops.
"I did a themed album at the beginning of the pandemic that didn’t get released. It was a real deep dive into my DNA ancestry because I got sick of the idea that when I grew up no one ever said anything about the old world.
"I made this suite of music that I'm really proud of and will have out sometime next year, but this record was only done because I’d gotten that out of my system and Randall Dunn asked if I wanted to do another one.”
MR: What rules did you self-impose?
DT: “My only rule was that I wanted to improvise and at some point Randall asked, ‘Do you think you're gonna bring the heavy?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I think I'm gonna put the heavy in’, which is when you add in all the distortion, you're slamming the amplifiers and there's a density of sound that’s its own thing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Indian music at all, but I have my own way of making Indian drone sounds. I can make shifting drones, and sometimes they go real heavy, just with feedback and such.
“For the last six years, I've been working on how to manipulate feedback and have done four records with the Swiss band Sonar that are feedback-only. I make all this noise based on tonal versions of drones that are big and heavy and he puts them into his computer and we write something over it. So for this LP, feedback was an important part of it.”
MR: Other than the feedback, the album is very diverse with lots of different guitar styles across it…
DT: “I’m a believer in learning idioms, taking what you want from them and walking my own path. What I bring to things is what I feel in the moment and that means there are times when I'm doing live solos and suddenly find myself playing in a near-flamenco style with very similar rhythmic tremolos on the strings.
"I'll use my hand on the top of the guitar to create rhythms like you’d normally perform on strings, or I'll play a pretty melody and add some chords to see what happens to it. You're supposed to play what you feel, so that’s how I roll.
“Charmaine Lee stayed for the entire recording sessions, lay down in the room and just enjoyed the music for herself. My son also came for at least one day of the recordings, so it was like having an audience for the whole thing.
"I think David Bowie was quite prescient in his vision of who I was and what I did. [For me] music is like what it is for people who go to church or take part in group meditations. I don't want to sound cheesy, but it’s sacred time and I try not to fuck with myself and just let things occur.”
MR: How do you know when it’s time to step in and out of that meditative state?
DT: “I’m just hearing things and trying to translate them. I’ll let the guitar guide me for five minutes and then I'll guide it or take over and do something with it until the next thing comes. Unless I'm being wry, I won't directly revert to a musical idiom, but once in a while I’ll go, 'Oh, that’s a cowboy chord', but it’s going to sound a lot different sonically than anybody else's cowboy chord because I've honed this.
“You know, I get on a plane and it’ll give me a headache because the noises that the plane makes are constantly driving melodies and chords and rhythms in my head. Sometimes I have to find a way to stop it, but that's very rare. I know it sounds strange and I just submitted to the fact that I'm a little bit odd.”
MR: Do you limit yourself to a few custom-made instruments, whether that's guitars, pedals or looping devices?
DT: “It's important for me to use things that I've learned to use and most of that stuff is absolutely purchase-able. I’ve used some custom stuff, but I don’t want to have to think about controlling certain parameters of an instrument and that includes electronic instruments. I've had to think way too much for somebody of my capabilities, but it was worth it because I like to believe that I’ve surpassed the vague goals I had.”
MR: After decades of experimenting with sound, are there still unexplored areas you're keen to visit?
DT: “I’ve been investigating two very different ways of dealing with quarter tones for years and I’ll never reach my goal, but I’m happy to take the path and try these things. I didn't want to go to Istanbul and study Turkish music or become a great Turkish musician, but some of my favourite musicians are in Turkey now and I want to bring all that in.
"I started playing a cümbüş (a Turkish banjo-esque instrument) and I'm not great at it, but it colours everything else. Then I started doing the quarter tone stuff on guitar, badly I admit, but not without emotion. It's not a trick - I'm trying to get to something, and that makes it all real for me.”
The new David Torn album, Now I Imagine a Place Not the Same, is out now on Kou Records.